The majority of MPs voted to approve the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill[1] and to support it becoming law.

Some of the Bill's key provisions included:

Introducing directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners to set local policing strategy.

Giving more powers to local councils in relation to licensing.

Changing the way demonstrations near Parliament are regulated.

Empowering the Home Secretary to temporarily ban drugs for up to a year and reforming the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs

A new requirement for private prosecutors to obtain the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions prior to the issue of an arrest warrant for ‘universal jurisdiction’ offences such as war crimes or torture

The text of motion rejected in this vote was:

That this House

declines to give a Second Reading to the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill because it introduces an expensive set of reforms which will do nothing to bring the police closer to the communities they serve;

because it risks a single elected politician remote from the frontline overruling operational policing decisions, thus ending one hundred and seventy years of tradition of police independence from politicians;

because it gives insufficient attention to the risks of police force collaboration being undermined by the creation of individually elected police commissioners; and

because the Government has indicated that it will implement this expensive and disruptive reform in the same year as the Government is making the biggest annual cut to police funding as set out in the Spending Review.

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